Anne O’Keeffe

• PhD in Applied Linguistics
• Senior Lecturer at Mary Immaculate College

Online communication via video platforms has become a standard component of workplace interaction for many businesses and employees. The rapid uptake in the use of virtual meeting platforms due to COVID-19 restrictions meant that many people had to quickly adjust to communication via this medium without much (if any) training as to how workplace co...

Online communication via video platforms has become a standard component of workplace interaction for many businesses and employees. The rapid uptake in the use of virtual meeting platforms due to COVID-19 restrictions meant that many people had to quickly adjust to communication via this medium without much (if any) training as to how workplace co...

Amid COVID-19 and the so-called “digital pivot”, online virtual communication is at the heart of our professional and private lives. As we move into a post-COVID context, the affordances of the digital turn have shown that we can operate professionally online but there is a need for better understanding of communication in the online workplace. Thi...

This research explores the pos tag sequences that shape the transition from upper intermediate (B2 cefr) to near-native proficiency (C2 cefr) in a corpus of essays ( n=32,410) from the Cambridge Learner Corpus. Gilquin (2018) and others have shown that pos tag sequences offer a holistic approach to extracting the most commonly used patterns without...

This volume highlights the ways in which recent developments in corpus linguistics and natural language processing can engage with topics across language studies, humanities and social science disciplines. New approaches have emerged in recent years that blur disciplinary boundaries, facilitated by factors such as the application of computational m...

This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the range of varieties of English spoken on the island of Ireland, featuring information on their historical background, structural features, and sociolinguistic considerations. The first part of the volume explores English and Irish in their historical framework as well as current issues of contact an...

This article makes the case for the importance of exposure to language patterns in the context of second language acquisition. From the theoretical perspective of the Usage-Based (UB) model of acquisition, I argue that in the process of first and second language acquisition, the learner attends to frequently used form-meaning pairings that they exp...

Insights from corpus linguistics (CL) have informed language learning and materials design, among many other areas. An important nexus between CL and language learning is the use of Data-Driven Learning (DDL), which draws on the use of corpus data in the classroom and which brings opportunities for inductive language discovery. Within the ethos of...

This chapter focuses on the need to address both theories of learning and theories of language acquisition in data-driven learning (DDL) research. While it recognises that there has been so much worthwhile research work on DDL which has shed so much light on the value of DDL, it is still not a mainstream methodology. The chapter argues that by unde...

Cambridge Education Research Reports. https://www.cambridge.org/gb/educationreform/insights/impact-usage-based-approaches-second-language-learning-and-teaching/

Data-driven learning – a call for a broader research gaze - Anne O'Keeffe

Corpus pragmatics (CP) refers to the use of corpus linguistics (CL) in the study of pragmatics. It is a relatively new concept compared to the integration of CL in other areas. Indeed, much of the potential of corpora for the study of pragmatics has not even been realised. The reason for this under-performance is largely due to the fact that CL tre...

This chapter employs a range of different corpora to examine pragmatic variation within the same language in some detail. However, before we begin the corpus work, it is worth exploring the study of linguistic variation in general. The first point of note is that the study of language variation has traditionally focused on phonological, lexical and...

This paper describes an ongoing corpus development and application project at the Mary Immaculate College and the University of Limerick, Ireland. The Limerick Corpus of Irish English is a one-million-word corpus of English as it is spoken in Ireland. The corpus is genre-based and consists primarily of casual conversational data. Details of the cor...

The English Grammar Profile project was a four-year quasi-longitudinal investigation of learner grammar, using the Cambridge Learner Corpus (CLC). This corpus comprises 55 million words, from over 200,000 exam scripts, across 200 countries, from candidates of over 140 first language backgrounds. The focus of the study was to scrutinize and describe...

The be + after + V-ing construction is probably the signature construction of Irish English. It has often been used in the portrayal of Irish characters in literature, theatre and cinema. This structure has been widely researched from many different perspectives. Its main function has been described as reporting the conclusion of an action by way o...

***A pragmática da interlíngua***

English Profile (EP) is an ongoing empirical exploration of learner English initiated by Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English, among others. EP aims to create a set of empirically-based descriptions of language competencies for English. ‘Reference Level Descriptors’ already exist as part of the Common European Framework of Reference (CE...

Corpus pragmatics is a methodological framework that allows for the interpretation of spoken or written meaning, with an emphasis on providing empirical evidence for this interpretation (see O'Keeffe et al. 2011). It is a relatively recent development within the field of corpus linguistics and interest in this “subfield” has blossomed as spoken cor...

This presentation will open with an overview of a research project currently being undertaken by a consortia of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Ireland, and supported by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (www.teachingandlearning.ie). The project aims to investigate and map the next steps in enhancing access to...

The Cambridge Guide to Blended Learning for Language Teaching makes the case that it is pedagogy, rather than technology, that should underpin the design of blended learning programmes. The book is organised into five sections: Connecting Theories and Blended Learning; Implications for Teaching; Rethinking Learner Interaction; Case Studies; The Fut...

Large and small language text corpora have become quite ubiquitous in the broad fields that make up the study of language and social interaction. This article provides an introduction to the concept of the “corpus” where language research is at issue and to the field of corpus linguistics. It reviews the main corpus analysis tools and the sort of p...

Corpus linguistics is a long-established method which uses authentic language data, stored in extensive computer corpora, as the basis for linguistic research. Moving away from the traditional intuitive approach to linguistics, which used made-up examples, corpus linguistics has made a significant contribution to all areas of the field. Until very...

This project, a national analysis, set out to examine strategies for sharing open educational resources (OERs) to enhance teaching and learning in Irish higher education. Drawing on the collective expertise and experience of colleagues, with on-going involvement in open educational resources, the study explored current practices and potential appro...

This chapter investigates the question of whether response items in Spanish can be analysed using frameworks developed for the study of similar items in English. Data comes from the Spanish corpus COREC, the Corpus Oral de Referencia del Español Contemporáneo, and is compared where appropriate with data from the British English corpus, CANCODE, the...

Spoken corpora are collections of spoken texts, either in the form of transcripts alone or accompanied by audio or audiovisual recordings, stored in a computer and made available for analysis using customized software programs. Keywords: concordances; corpus; spoken; concordances; corpus; spoken

This collection of original articles provides a state-of-the-art overview of key issues and approaches in contemporary language teaching. Written by internationally prominent researchers, educators, and emerging scholars, the chapters are grouped into five sections: rethinking our understanding of teaching, learner diversity and classroom learning,...

In this paper, we consider how a combined corpus linguistics and conversation analysis methodology can reveal new insights into the relationship between interaction patterns, language use, and learning. The context of the paper is higher education small group teaching sessions and our data are drawn from a one million word corpus, the Limerick-Belf...

INTRODUCTION Much has been written about vocabulary from different perspectives. A large body of work looks at how vocabulary is learnt or acquired. This falls largely under the area of Second Language Acquisition. Another substantial area of research relates to describing the lexicon, that is how many words, word families, how words are organised...

This chapter will explore the notion of language competencies. It will look briefly at the widely used and accepted Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and its different competence descriptors and can-do statements. We will explore how competencies can best be measured and will give details of the English Profile programme. To this end, w...

In this article, we consider how corpus linguistics (CL) and conversation analysis (CA) can be used together to provide enhanced descriptions of spoken interaction in the context of small group teaching in higher education. From our analysis of the data, we show how the two approaches can be combined in an iterative process to account for features...

ANNE O'KEEFFE, senior lecturer at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland, is author of numerous publications, including: Introducing Pragmatics in Use (2011) with Brian Clancy and Svenja Adolphs; English Grammar Today (2011) and English Grammar Today Workbook (2011) with Ronald Carter, Michael McCarthy and Geraldine Mark (Cambridg...

Introducing Pragmatics in Use is a lively and accessible introduction to pragmatics, which both covers theory and applies it to real spoken and written data.

This volume contains 45 chapters across a range of key topics about Corpus Linguistics.

In this paper, we consider how a combined corpus linguistics and conversation analysis methodology can reveal new insights into the relationship between interaction patterns, language use, and learning. The context of the paper is higher education small group teaching sessions and our data are drawn from a one million-word corpus, the Limerick-Belf...

From Corpus to Classroom summarises and makes accessible recent work in corpus research, focusing particularly on spoken data. It is based on analysis of corpora such as CANCODE and Cambridge International Corpus, and written with particular reference to the development of corpus-informed pedagogy. The book explains how corpora can be designed and...

This paper looks at a well-documented form in Irish English, 'be after + Verb-ing' (e.g. 'He's after forgetting to pay her') which roughly equates to the present perfect aspect in Standard English. The structure, a calque on an Irish form, has been used in the past in literature and cartoons to both characterize and stigmatize Irish English. This p...

An introduction to the many factors in understanding teaching and learning vocabulary. It also includes reflective tasks and insights from corpus data.

The use of vague language is one of the most common features of everyday spoken English. Speakers regularly use vague expressions to project shared knowledge (e.g., pens, books, and that sort of thing) as well as to make approximations (e.g. around sevenish, he’s sort of tall). Research shows that many of the most common single word items in a core...

A wide-ranging coverage of the insights from Corpus Linguistics for English Language Teaching.

This chapter analyses the language of child abuse in the context of newspaper reports. Child abuse as a crime indisputably carries with it strong social taboo and so representing it for public consumption necessitates great sensitivity and ‘deftness of pen’. Here we look at two contexts of child abuse, one institutional and one domestic and we comp...

Carter and McCarthy (2006, p. 202) assert that VL expressions are a strong indication of an assumed shared knowledge and that they mark in-group membership, in so far as the referents of vague expressions can be assumed to be known by the listener. This is consistent with Cutting (2000), who illustrates how discourse communities use VL as a marker...

Michael McCarthy is Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, UK, Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University, USA, and Adjunct Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He is author of Vocabulary (Oxford University Press, 1990), Discourse analysis for...

Investigating Media Discourse explores spoken interactions in the media, drawing on contemporary sources from the English speaking world including chat shows, radio phone-ins and political interviews with leaders such as Tony Blair and George W.Bush. The main theoretical framework used in this work is influenced by Goffman, where each media encount...

A corpus-based study of spoken language in the media, including radio phone-ins, political interviews and chat shows.

This paper will use a corpus to explore vague categorisation (e.g., prostitutes, sailors and the like) in a specific context where the participants are strangers, but where they share the same socio-cultural reference points and so can assume a critical level of shared socio-cultural knowledge when they use vague language. Unlike most work on vague...

This paper describes an ongoing corpus development and application project at the Mary Immaculate College and the University of Limerick, Ireland. The Limerick Corpus of Irish English is a one-million word corpus of English as it is spoken in Ireland. The corpus is genre-based and consists primarily of casual conversational data. Details of the cor...

This paper will use a corpus to explore vague categorisation (e.g. prostitutes, sailors and the like) in a specific context where the participants are strangers, but where they share the same socio-cultural reference points and so can assume a critical level of shared socio-cultural knowledge when they use vague language. Unlike most work on vague...

The vast increase in the number of corpus-based materials, such as dictionaries and grammars, attests to the importance of corpus linguistics to English language description. Developments are also evident in the use of corpora in the classroom in data-driven learning (Johns, 1991). These rapid developments in the use of language-related technology...

This paper looks at the use of vocatives across two corpora: the 5-million word Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE) and a 55,000- word corpus of radio phone-in calls. 100 vocatives are sampled from the CANCODE corpus, using only informal, casual conversations among intimates, friends and close associates. All vocatives...